ñSince the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalism has become a powerful force throughout the Muslim world.ñ
From the 1920s, politics in most states in the Muslim world were dominated by leaders who were either Western-educated or at least admirers of Western achievements. An urban elite in cities such as Istanbul, Teheran, and Cairo grew relatively wealthy and adopted a Western lifestyle. Rapid population growth, however, continued to increase the numbers of peasants and poorer townspeople in the Muslim world. For these disadvantaged masses, the modernization policies of their leaders brought only a sense of greater inequality and relative poverty. They remained attached to the traditional values of Islam.
~The Muslim Brotherhood~
As early as 1928, a militant Islamic movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood was set up in Egypt, then under British domination. When General Gamal Abdul Nasser (1918-70) came to power in Egypt in the early 1950s, he dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood. Its leaders were either hanged or sent to prison camps. Nasser and his successor as ruler of Egypt, Anwar Sadat (1918-81), represented the modernizing and Westernizing tradition in the Arab world. They had no sympathies with the Muslim Brotherhood's desire to restore pure Islamic law and customs. But the Brotherhood found widespread support among Egypt's poor peasants and recent immigrants from the countryside to fast-growing Egyptian cities. In 1981, Sadat was assassinated by Islamic extremists. Terrorist attacks by the Muslim Brotherhood continued into the 1990s, aimed in particular at Western tourists. The influence of tourism was seen by Islamic extremists as corrupting Egyptian society.
~Rule of the ayatollahs~
Until the late 1970s, Iran was a classic example of a Middle Eastern state that had turned its back on Islamic tradition and adopted a Western style of government and, for the prosperous elite, a Westernized lifestyle. Only Turkey had been more thorough-going in its official abandonment of Islamic law and dress. But in 1978-79, the Westernized regime of the Shah was overthrown by a mass uprising, inspired by an elderly religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini (1902-89). The Ayatollah made Iran an Islamic Republic, ruled according to the strictest precepts of the Shi'ite version of Islam. Power lay with 200,000 mullahs (priests), who dictated every detail of daily life. Places of entertainment and sports facilities were closed down, women were obliged to cover their hair with a traditional scarf called the chadar, Western music was banned, men and women were segregated in public places, and even sea bathing had to be carried on fully clothed. Thousands of opponents of the Islamic government were killed. By the 1990s, the resurgence of Islam had swept through most of the Muslim world. Even in Turkey, the first Muslim country to adopt Western ways, Islamic parties now won majority support. In Pakistan, Islamic parties won elections in 1997. In the North African state of Algeria, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front waged a brutal terrorist campaign of assassination and massacre against the government and Westernized Algerians, such as journalists. In Afghanistan, the defence of Islamic traditions was a major element in the wars fought by mujahedin - guerrilla fighters - from 1979 onward, first against the Soviet Union, then against a communist central government, and finally against one another. In 1996, a fundamentalist mujahedin group known as the Taleban captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, and imposed the strictest version of Islamic law anywhere in the world.ì m ▒ ╚
